Tag Archives: Life

Feeling low or lost? is your life filled with anxiety, fear, or worry? Don’t know which way to turn? Need a boost to your self-esteem, or directions about how to find your purpose?

Then, great news: my latest book Why Your Life Matters is now available on Amazon for your Kindle and as a paperback. Also, of course, to be found on iTunes. I’m so proud of it. Already it’s received seven unsolicited reviews on Amazon, saying amazing things, such as:

‘You will love this book….a must-read…brilliant writer…’

‘Rich with wisdom, replete with guiding principles, and abundantly practical, this book is for us all.’

‘To be short and to the point, this is a wonderful, wonderful read. Once started, I could not put this book down.’

There is nothing out there like this. It is inspirational, uplifting, moving, informative stuff that I guarantee will change how you handle life’s challenges. Above all, it will help you understand who you are and your place in the universe, as well as inspiring you to find and fulfill your purpose.

‘Why Your Life Matters is food for the soul for anyone seeking to make sense of his or her life. Great wisdom lives here. Read it and remember why you and your life are indeed important.’ – Alan Cohen.

“So well-written. A very enjoyable read.” Dr. Rita Louise, Just Energy Radio

Last year, I posted a blog entry called What if…?, reflective of the melancholy mood that had me by the throat one day, prompted by the event of an upcoming solar eclipse.

Recently, this post has received a large amount of traffic, I notice, so I thought it might be timely to dust it off and give it a fresh outing. We live in a time of great transition and transformation. A lot of people, I suspect, are feeling this way. Maybe it applies to you or someone you know. If so, by all means forward it.

***

What if, one day, you woke up with a dangerous thought in your head? An unthinkable thought. A thought you’d never had before. A thought so different, so foreign, so far-removed from anything you’d thought previously that it is entirely possible you weren’t even the one who thought it? That it must – could only – have been planted there by someone – some thing, being, dimension – else.

What if, one day, you woke up and, the second you opened your eyes, you found yourself thinking, “That’s it. It’s over. I’m done”?

You’ve tried for years, approached it from every angle, done your level best to make it work out, given it all you had, doing all of this in full expectation that, someday, if you just kept on trying, there’d be a pay-off; that someone would recognize your efforts and go, “My god, where have you been? I’ve been looking all over” and pluck you from the drudgery you’ve been toiling away at optimistically for two decades.

But it didn’t happen, did it? Even though it seems to happen regularly to other people, sadly it didn’t happen to you.

Not only that, but now there’s something else too.

Close on the heels of the first dangerous thought comes a second. An even more dangerous one. You realize all of a sudden that, oh my god, it’s never going to happen to you, is it?

Ever.

Not if you toil optimistically for the next twenty years as well. Or for the twenty after that.

At some juncture in the past, not sure when, you took a wrong turn. Picked the wrong destiny. Followed a path that sparkled and promised plenty at the time, but which was faulty and turned out, after all the beans were counted and points tallied, to be a vast waste of time and effort. Too late, it hits you that the fantasy you fell for was a decoy. You were never meant to go down this path in the first place, which is why your efforts came to naught. Because it wasn’t your path. Like a prize idiot, you were trying to live somebody else’s dream, you just didn’t realize it.

And what if, after having thought the first dangerous thought and the second dangerous thought, and counted the beans and tallied the points, you realized finally the full extent of the – huge, massive, catastrophic – blunder you’d made and quickly reached a decision? Right there on the spot. A decision to do something equally as dangerous?

To change course. Too late? Why? And even if it is, what the hell!

To give up….

….quit struggling….

….quit hanging on, trying to make it work…

….to take your hands off the tiller…

…undig your fingernails from the future you were so certain was yours and which you’ve been clinging onto fruitlessly all this time, the way Titanic survivors clung to floating deckchairs…

….and just LET GO?

This week, there’s a penumbral full moon eclipse, the third of four this year.

It’s not visible from the US, so don’t bother rushing outside to look, but it’s happening, trust me, and if you buy into the whole astrology thing, then you’ll know that this is a very powerful symbolic time for us all.

Such an eclipse signals important endings. Once-and-for-all, pay-the-piper type of endings. The kind we come to dread. The ones that tell you that your locomotive has run out of steam and shunted into the terminus; now it’s time to disembark and find a new train to a different destination. No fuss, no regrets. That’s just how it is.

I wonder how many other people are experiencing that feeling first hand right now.

What if it’s everyone?

In some form, in some way, in some aspect of their life? I’m just saying.

I confess, nothing in this world brings a sparkle to my jaded eye on an overcast Monday morning in Los Angeles quite like hearing that the television industry is in trouble, with ratings in the toilet, executives being canned, and advertisers fleeing like kids from a burning orphanage.

It feels so right somehow. Like justice, or something.

The Wrap website today features the first part of a series of articles about the decline and predicted extinction of TV as we know it. It’s worth reading.

Out of work TV executive

Speaking as someone who’s worked in TV on both sides of the Atlantic and been forced to deal with ghastly weasels who call themselves producers, as well as slimey, two-faced network executives with zero scruples or backbone, it gives me the greatest pleasure to witness karma at work as these rats are slowly, year upon year, flushed from the plush, carpeted, five-star drains they’ve been cowering in for so long and out into the open job market.

Television is changing for good. Having destroyed their industry by flooding the schedules increasingly with cheap, annoying, sensationalist and ultimately no-quality product, the suits are now finding – surprise surprise – that viewers are drifting away, searching for something more productive to do with their time, taking advertisers, and therefore budgets, with them.

Howard Stern this morning declared the end of TV as we know it, blaming a string of lousy and misguided executive decisions that focused on pandering to the mindless youth demographic of this country rather than producing quality shows. And he’s right. HBO and a couple of other cable networks are the lone wolves in the quality TV department. Everyone else has thrown in the towel. (Need an example? See Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami.)

My next door neighbor is on the board of HBO. He’s an incredibly smart man. If the rest of his colleagues are like him, it’s no wonder the network is thriving.

Sadly, he’s an isolated case. Most executives are not that astute. Usually, when we see these people sitting in their fancy corner offices making multi-million dollar deals, we assume they got where they are because they’re brilliant at what they do, when in fact, all too often, the exact opposite is true.

Kath and Kim

Look at the way Ben Silverman brought NBC to its creative knees with a string of appalling shows that were cancelled either during or, if they made it that far, at the end of the first season, never to reappear: Kath and Kim, My Own Worst Enemy, Knight Rider, Crusoe, Kings, Life, Lipstick Jungle….

Ghastly, every last one of them. Who on earth would ever think we’d want to sit and watch this trash? Oh, wait – Ben Silverman did. This is the trail of devastation he left behind him when he left.

My own experience of working with TV people confirms that they’re anything but the geniuses we have them down for. Most are faceless yes-monkeys, slaves to focus group findings and marketing surveys, whose main aptitude seems to be for manipulation, deceit and lying; everything else – judgment, creative ability, decisive action, vision, etc; stuff that really matters – is either secondary or non-existent.

A TV executive has one main priority: to keep his job as a TV executive and not get fired for making bad decisions. That’s it. If a show’s a hit, claim it as your own; if it flops, keep your head down and move on to the next thing. To hell with what’s actually good and worthwhile or what raises the bar and advances the medium.

So I applaud the dire prospects of the TV industry. And I absolutely love that the fall-out is taking many of the yes-monkeys with it.

Now, having said that, I will hand the baton jubilantly over to Josef Adalian at The Wrap for his analysis of the devastation that is taking place.

“Network TV may be a cyclical business — but for bruised and battered broadcasters battling the worst economy in a generation, there’s little evidence to suggest a bounce back is in the cards any time soon.

If anything, things could get a lot worse before they get better. Some observers are even beginning to question whether there will ever be a turnaround, predicting that business model which has sustained broadcasters for close to 60 years has begun an irreversible decline.

The latest blow: A disastrous upfront advertising market that saw revenues plunge an estimated 15 percent from last year, dropping from $9.2 billion in 2008 to around $7.8 billion, according to estimates by several publications….”